The head refusing OFSTED

[Indigoshift]

Not seen a thread on this. Apologies if there us one.

AIBU to think Flora is very brave but good on her for standing up and showing that OFSTED is not fit for purpose?

news.sky.com/story/headteacher-to-refuse-ofsted-inspection-following-ruth-perry-death-12838983 Headteacher to refuse Ofsted inspection after death of fellow principal Ruth Perry 

For all those parents who look to OFSTED reports when choosing a school there's an Interesting stat on the BBC website this morning:

The academics looked at 10 years of Ofsted inspections of secondary schools and how that related to GCSE results five years later.

Once they had taken account of children's backgrounds, and how well they had done already at school, there was "no detectable difference" between Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate.

I'm glad the lid has blown off OFSTED. Watching family members in the teaching profession going through the inspections over the years has shown me what a stressful pile of nonsense it is.

I didn't even know they could refuse

Its not all about results though. I want my child to be safe at school but thanks that is interesting to know.

Ofsted gave a good rating to a school that locked a child outside naked as a punishment. Not sure why you think they’d give a single shit about students being lost. Studies have shown there is no detectable difference in the standard of a school based on their Ofsted ranking.

They can’t as far as the rules go. She just didn’t let them in.

Cool more power to her

The school in my town which is outstanding I never send my DD too for several good reasons. I had a friend who did and her D's struggled (due to the main reason I decided to not send DD to the outstanding school..the set up at playtime) and been bullied which luckily been sorted now. Example of the difference between the school s...outstanding school was given a word to dress up as on world book day, good school said choose a book you love and dress up as someone in that and all the teachers dressed up too. Not much difference but glad I didn't have word to dress dd in...some of the words were impossible and you didn't get to choose your word. I choose the good school with amazing head and felt a better fit for DD. Agree Ofsted needs an overall...a snapshot on one day or couple of day isn't a good way of looking at the school.

If a pilot fucks up, the result can be over a thousand people dying horribly in air and on the ground.

You'd have to have a biology lesson involving releasing bubonic plague infected vermin into the school kitchen to have approximately the same scale of disaster in a school.

As someone who has worked in a school I don't think @Raineth post was without idea.

I am uncomfortable with both ofsted and the way it's bulldozing I am also uncomfortable with the idea a school can say no we won't be under any account. We need accountability. I dont think ofsted does this well And I agree with the poster who said noone should be driven to commit suicide due to their work.

I would welcome a overhaul of ofsted but to me permitting a head teacher to say no to the current set up is not without its own concerns.

Train drivers sit a formal exam at qualifying and then again after two years then every three years after that. In between times there is a programme of assessment including random downloads of the train's otmr (black box) to check standards, rides with a manager etc. There are additional assessments on top of these if a driver has made a mistake.

It's not impossible to persecute a driver if the manager so wishes but the union would be involved fairly early on.

@notimagain

I’m glad you mentioned aviation because my husband works in that sector. We had a long old chat about it all last night and he came to the conclusion that the big difference between the CAA and various other aviation inspection bodies and Ofsted is that the aviation inspectors and working to a set a standards that are easily measurable- record keeping, safety etc.

Ofsted is a political weapon these days. They goal posts change from year to year (sometimes wildly) to suit whoever is Secretary of State for Education. This means we are sometime tearing up and rebuilding all our units from year to year. And the focus of inspection changes too- behaviour, SEND, LAC etc

They are not impartial observers. They are going in with an agenda and that agenda is never really to help staff or kids. It’s to tick some central government boxes about what they think schools should look like. Not the reality of what is best for children.

I say this as someone who has been through Ofsted three times. They start that first day knowing what they are going to give you before they’ve seen a lesson. Your job is to persuade them otherwise.

These examples are just not comparable. A train driver/pilot is in control of a machine which responds in a given
way if controlled correctly ( barring emergencies for which there are set procedures),
A teacher could deliver a perfectly designed and pitched lesson but it will be received in a myriad of ways by the target audience. Some choose not to get involved at all, or to deliberately disrupt. Some become bored rapidly, or feel tired or unwell. Yet a negative judgement is given if all pupils do not achieve certain outcomes. It’s not comparable with getting a machine from one place to another.

@Boudicasbeard is absolutely right. The inspectors are taken to task if they don’t find something to criticise.

I worked in a school that was deemed Fresh Start and probably went through a dozen monitoring visits and Ofsted. It was never supportive.

I suspect the elements a train driver is assessed on are 99% within the drivers control? Other than freak weather, someone/something on the tracks. And even then, there will be set rules to follow in a given situation.

Or are the standards different depending on how the examiner interprets them in that day?

Does the examiner judge the driver by how the passengers on the train behaved?

It's not the same.

Suicide is not straightforward. It was probably a culmination of things, not just Ofsted that drove that poor woman to take her life.
I agree ofsted needs looking at , but it’s not the sole issue here .

While I agree that Ofsted has problems and the system needs an overhaul, I also think schools do need monitoring and that it’s unfair to blame them for this sad death. Suicide is complex.

@rosesinmygarden @Pottedpalm I don't think anyone has said they're the same. The question was whether other occupations are subject to the same level of scrutiny (not the exact same scrutiny). One of my besties is a head teacher, another has left teaching already. You couldn't pay me enough to teach in this country. I fully support teachers striking.

If the poster who asked about scrutiny is considering a move to another industry and wants to know about the levels of observation and scrutiny then it's best they know the reality of those jobs before moving frying pan to fire. It doesn't help anyone to encourage them into something that is unsuitable.

@rosesinmygarden yes, there is variation in how managers interpret things, since you asked. One will tell you to do something one way and on another day one will pull you up for the exact same thing. Internal standard production is poor, it tends to be the national standards that are black and white but there are many assessments completed on things that are not standard nationally.

@MsWhitworth

Maybe you can’t understand because you’re not a teacher. It was her vocation. She’d been an outstanding head (as testified by her staff and pupils) for decades.

She’d given her life to her school- headship means long hours (70 plus a week), sacrificing family events during term time and always putting your school first. Heads don’t really have holidays like the teachers do. They are in school over holidays monitoring building works or looking after admin staff or updating policies or doing CAfCASs meeting or a while host of things that carry on during the holidays.

So when they down graded her school to RI she knew if meant that she’d never work again. She would lose her job as soon as the report came out. And she would never get another.

Because for heads and RI at Ofstead is like a scarlet letter. A badge of shame. You failed. You drove a school to inadequate. No parent body or governing body would ever let you run a school again. Your shame spread across a whole school community.

i can understand why she did it.

A child was locked outside naked as a punishment? What?

So train drivers must have some sympathy with the way ofsted works. It's just not fair when the goal posts are moved.

It's so hard for people outside of an industry to understand what it is like for those on the inside. Which explains why many people outside of teaching seem to think teachers are lying/exaggerating about ofsted.

Yep. The Hesley Group residential special schools were given a Good Ofsted rating even after over 100 complaints to Ofsted about the way children were being treated. Incidents included being locked outside naked, intentionally denied their medication as punishment, children receiving injuries including a black eye from staff, children being swung by their ankles by staff, children being punched and kicked in the stomach by staff, staff hitting a child over the head with a ringbinder… And yet, with the school that Ruth Perry ran, they received an inadequate rating because Ofsted thought that a child flossing on the playground was a safeguarding risk. The very concept that Ofsted play any role at all in safeguarding children is a joke. They don’t.

If someone posted on here saying their DC had got in trouble at school for flossing on the playground because it’s a safeguarding risk, every response would say that the school are being ridiculous - and rightly so. A school cannot predict which ridiculous thing an Ofsted inspector will hone in on to justify downgrading a school and that’s why the inspections are so stressful. It’s not like other professions (like mine) where the regulatory body judge you based on your actual ability to do what you’re supposed to do. Ofsted are being told to downgrade school for political reasons and are finding any reason that they can to downgrade Outstanding schools and keep the bad school rated Good.

I am out of classroom teaching now (thank fuck), but I went through 3 OFSTED's (managed to dodge one by giving birth the day of 'the call' - I hadn't gone on maternity leave by then. The Head nearly had an aneurism). The hoops to jump through were different every time.

One inspection seemed to be about the ethnicity and pupil premium progress data, so we had to spend days dissecting the class according to arbitrary ethnicity codes. It was a farce. I worked in an incredibly multi-cultural area, so would have to say daft things like '100% of Polish children are making above expected progress' (1 child).

Second time was all about mini plenaries and assessment for learning (the school had a stupid system of traffic lights on the tables so children could constantly assess whether they were meeting their learning objective). Again. Totally ridiculous and interrupted their work every 5 minutes to say 'remember your traffic lights!' - and I taught Year 1 who had no idea what they were for, really.

Last one was the 'deep dive' framework, which is still in place. Months of annoying each other about the subjects we were leading. Re-writing curricula and monitoring everyone else's planning for Music or Science. Again - totally distracting.

I assume that when pilots or train drivers are assessed, it isn't for some new idea that someone in the Department for Transport has dreamed up in an office somewhere without any idea of how a train or plane actually works? Because that's how it feels. We trained to teach. Lots of us have years of experience and know our teaching styles - let us do it how it works for us, please!

We do in nursing (I'm a Mental Health Nurse). The inspectors come into the ward and go through our care plans, risk assessments, basically all nursing documentation and they speak to our patients. They also watch the general goings on in the ward.

No, the dft like to tell everyone they have nothing to do with the running of TOCs but that's for another day. We tend to have graduate entry people who've never worked an operational role in their lives impose arbitray driving policies that don't allow us to use our judgment then hammer us with requests for info about delays caused by driving to such policies or nitpick when we don't comply 100%. Or produce 9.5 hour turns that are within parameters by the skin of their teeth and that start at 3am and wonder why there are incidents. I think fuckwittery from on high is sadly universal.

@rosesinmygarden of course, I have enormous sympathy for teachers. They are wildly undervalued and mistrusted, subject to ever more ludicrous ideas from idiots that don't know what they're talking about and are hauled over the coals for things they're not then allowed to do anything about. It's insanity.

No, the dft like to tell everyone they have nothing to do with the running of TOCs but that's for another day. We tend to have graduate entry people who've never worked an operational role in their lives impose arbitray driving policies that don't allow us to use our judgment then hammer us with requests for info about delays caused by driving to such policies or nitpick when we don't comply 100%. Or produce 9.5 hour turns that are within parameters by the skin of their teeth and that start at 3am and wonder why there are incidents. I think fuckwittery from on high is sadly universal.

Well this sounds horrendous. It seems this is the way of things now. Too much 'accountability' and not enough common sense or idea of reality. All about the numbers, isn't it?